A while into my brother’s military training, we started going on holiday to the Moritzburg Lakes. Without Peter, my father said the trip to Obersee wasn’t really worth it, and Moritzburg was closer to home. But Moritzburg was no mirror lake. The reeds were thick and the water silted. The woodland around it was dark even at midday, and there were several places I was not allowed to go. I missed my brother terribly.

In lighter moods I heard my mother laughing to my father, asking if they shouldn’t take a trip on the lake and leave me behind. Behind? And be left with whom? The nanny had gone on her own holiday and there was no Peter to keep an eye out against these secluded groves; these needs for privacy. Travelling at speed in my father’s motorcar I’d often spot a rushing between the branches: bird-flight, probably, and then my mother would make some incongruous comment about the weather, though I kept on questioning what was between the flickering elms.

Seeing Kirchner’s Bathers at Moritzburg – a group of naked swimmers kissing and carousing by the water – convinced me that I wanted to be an artist. I was sixteen when I saw the painting. Not only did the veil drop from my eyes, as if Kirchner himself had parted the trees and revealed the naked bodies to the young boy’s stare, but it was the painting itself which seemed to awaken me from all stupor – the primitive forms, the block colours, the thickness of the impasto: all this had combined into an astonishing seduction of my gaze.

From that moment on, I wanted to make work like that. After seeing the Kirchner painting I would forever see art (and it was an unfashionable notion, even then) as a means to the truth. The painting had lanced the woodland and revealed the truth. Though Obersee might astonish, it was the silted Dresden lakes that really changed how I viewed the world.

And the Bauhaus was the culmination of all this. I had heard of the new art school as soon as it had opened. I had read its manifesto, its ideas of putting men and women, and the arts and crafts, on equal footing. Utopia in Weimar: which it was, at least for a little while.

Besides, it was the only place a modern artist would dream of studying. Despite all of my father’s reservations (he wanted me to attend Dresden Art Academy), I persuaded him to pay my fees: I appealed to his nature that genuinely believed, as I did, that there was a truth in beauty that could be captured by the brush on the page.